TOKYO, June 3, 2022—Over several past months, many Japanese government officials were arrested, reprimanded and/or punished for committing crimes. There’s nothing new about that. But when a crime involves tax administrators who are solely responsible for collecting tax in supposedly equitable regime, it should be handled differently for, as Japanese treasury bureaucrats would declare, ‘tax is the foundation of a sovereign country.’
In early June, Japanese newspapers reported that Tokyo police had arrested seven men and women, including a 24-year-old National Tax Administration officer and a former NTA officer, for swindling government COVID-19 financial aid totaling approximately $1.7 million by filing false applications on behalf of some 200 applicants for the program and instead yf distributing the money, they pocketed it for themselves. The suspects were charged for fraud.
Finance minister Shunichi Suzuki June 3 apologized at a parliamentary session and emphasized that the ministry would ensure that such irregularities won’t recur. In 2021, two junior ‘career’ trade ministry officers committed comparable serious fraud by swindling government money.
What’s disturbing to The Prospect is that the latest crime was reported as a local news story by most major Japanese media. It may not be a front-page splasher as there have been a plethora of crimes committed by government officers, ranging from sexual harassment, government handouts-related scams, and murders of kind. (Until several years ago, when bureaucrats were implicated in crimes and scandals, they were top headline news.)
BUT the fact that a country’s tax authority officer was engaged as a leader of a government payment scam speaks for its significance and ramifications to its tax administration policy. Can taxpayers trust the tax office? How do folks of malicious minds see this crime if penalties are generous?
Such serious implications were set aside by the Japanese media, which volunteeried to treat it as a local crime story with a relatively small headline. It was the case with the Yomiuri and other national newspapers on June 1, though perhaps with a sense of guilt and embarrassment about journalism, it carried a followup article on June 2.
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